Mónica Pustilnik ALESSANDRO PICCININI Lute Music

Alessandro Piccinini, a contemporary of Monteverdi and Frescobaldi, hailed from a Bolognese family of lutenists that made its mark on Italian musical life for over one and a half centuries. At the court of Ferrara, Alessandro became familiar with the development of a new kind of lute that would later be designated as the archiliuto. This instrument is notable for its second extended neck to accommodate drone strings and was enthusiastically taken up by contemporaries such as Carlo Gesualdo.

After a longer sojourn in Rome, Alessandro Piccinini returned in 1611 to Bologna, where he published his lute works in 1623 after a lengthy preparation. The preface to this (first) volume contains a fundamental introduction to playing the lute and chitarrone; then as now, it was a decisive source for lute technique. After Piccinini' death, his son Leonardo Maria published a second volume with lute pieces by his father in 1639. Stylistically, Piccinini's lute works are influenced by the emergent Italian instrumental music, but French and Spanish influences can also be clearly heard.

On the present recording, Mónica Pustilnik introduces a selection from both of Piccinini's lute books. The lutenist, from Buenos Aires, is much in demand as a soloist and chamber musician; alongside these activities, she can also be regularly heard in outstanding ensembles for historical performance practice such as Le Concert d’Astrée, Les Musiciens du Louvre and Les Talens Lyriques.

Ruby Hughes / Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann / Jonas Nordberg HEROINES OF LOVE AND LOSS

The women appearing before our ears throughout this programme range from the Virgin Mary and Dido, queen of Carthage, to Shakespeare’s Desdemona and the unfortunate Anne Boleyn, waiting for her execution in the Tower of London in 1536. But the disc also features four other heroines – the Italian composers Claudia Sessa, Francesca Caccini, Lucrezia Vizzana and Barbara Strozzi. All active between 1590 – 1675, they will have required great courage to rise above the social conventions of the time, but this surprisingly productive period for female composers also offered an opportunity that would disappear in later centuries: the all-female environment provided by the convent. More than half of the women who published music before 1700 were nuns, including Sessa and Vizzana, who are here represented by brief meditations on the suffering and death of Christ. Caccini and Strozzi, on the other hand, lived very much in the secular world – Caccini at the Florentine court and Strozzi as a free-lance musician and composer in Venice. Unhindered by the restrictions imposed by the church on sacred music they both adhered to the new stile moderno championed by Claudio Monteverdi. Celebrated for their singing, they composed vocal music which makes ‘the words the mistress of the harmony and not the servant’, to quote Monteverdi’s brother Giulio Cesare. The soprano Ruby Hughes has already made her name for herself in a wide-ranging repertoire, but has a special love for the constellation of lute, cello and voice. With Jonas Nordberg and Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann – who also contribute instrumental solos – she here revels in the dramatic and expressive potential offered by the combination, and by the music by these female composers and their English colleagues Henry Purcell and John Bennet.

Véronique Gens / Les Talens Lyriques / Christophe Rousset TRAGÉDIENNES 2

This is the second instalment of Véronique Gens's Tragédiennes series, which examines how francophone composers from the 18th and early 19th centuries dealt with the heroines of classical tragedy. Classical, in this context, means Racine as well as Greek and Roman drama, though Gens contentiously widens the definition even further at one point to include a chunk of Sacchini's Renaud, based on Tasso's Renaissance epic Gerusalemme Liberata. The programme is variable, with giants such as Gluck and Berlioz placed alongside also-rans such as Piccinni and Grétry. All of it, however, requires the ability to sing words as well as phrases, and Gens's immaculate way with a text is often as mesmerising as her ability to sustain the long sculpted lines that are a common stylistic feature among her chosen composers. There are some surprises: she sings Cassandra's music from Berlioz's Les Troyens, where we might expect to hear her as Dido; when she turns to Cherubini's Medea, for what is probably the greatest track on the disc, it is to play the sorrowing maid Neris, rather than the pathological heroine. Her accompanists are Christophe Rousset and Les Talens Lyriques, a bit lightweight in Berlioz, but startling and effective elsewhere. (Tim Ashley / The Guardian)